So what do you do when the times are tough? While we’ve definitely trimmed the fat here at Sozo Firm and are quite lean right now in terms of staff and hours and extra spending money, we’ve been staying relatively busy expanding our web design division and developing strategies for new business divisions.
Our Sozo Creative web development team has recently launched a couple micro one pager sites for our client CFgear, including one targeting the frequent search “promotional products USB” and a similarly templated one expanding their presence online for educational institutions looking for USB flash drives.
For Custom Flash Gear, a seller that works solely with ASI members shopping for custom flash drives, we redesigned their existing website to make it more eye friendly and user oriented. They’ve seen sales through their website increase.
For our client New Creations Chapel of Richmond, Indiana, we’ve got a whole list of web design projects in the oven. We just finished a site for them promoting their under construction giant cross on interstate 70 (on the border of Indiana and Ohio) and are now in the middle of a greatly needed redesign of their main website (which will hopefully be launched in the next week or two).
Our CEO’s wife, a local Stampin’ Up demonstrator, just requested a redesign of her popular craft blog’s header using a photograph she took.
Open Bible Baptist Church of Cobleskill, New York recently joined the world wide web with a simple site we developed for them. Our CEO has also requested that his church’s website be redesigned, so it looks like we’ll be working on church related websites for several weeks straight.
Off the subject of website development (well, partially off the subject), and on to new business development for the Sozo Firm network. Our CEO is an artist – with strong leanings toward modern art. We’re planning to develop several websites promoting the new-to-come Sozo Gallery division of Sozo Firm. We’re excited about this new development and will post more information as things progress.
We’re also considering taking our Sozo the Magician division and turning it more into a charitable outreach venture. Our CEO has dibble dabbled in magic since he was a child, and we originated the site a third as a marketing experiment, a third as a hobby and a third as a community outreach project. The site was by far more successful than his under-development-still talents can meet. While he was hoping to serve in one school or community event per month, the number of leads coming in have been too great for someone who is only a hobby magician. Thus the debate over what to do with this division. The site is basic and really needs to be redesigned, yet he doesn’t really have the time to handle more than one or two events a month. Only time will tell. One thought is to turn the division into an outreach for children in hospitals and other life benefiting situations. There are many magicians out there for serving at children’s birthday parties, and the minimal time he has can probably best be invested into personal and group events that really have an impact in ways far beyond the magical realm.
We definitely don’t claim to be the best in terms of web design, but we’re excited by the progress our Sozo Creative web development division has made to date. Hey, check back in a year or so and you’ll probably be surprised! We’re also very excited by the continuing expansion of our business model and can’t wait to see what the rest of 2009 has in store for Sozo Firm.
